Making Freedom
The Extraordinary Life of Venture Smith
Chandler B. Saint, George A. Krimsky; James O. Horton, fwd.
The inspiring story of an 18th-century New England slave who emancipated himself
Making Freedom is the first in-depth exploration of the life of Venture Smith (1728–1805), a New England slave who was sold into bondage as a boy in Africa and labored for nearly a quarter-century before purchasing his own freedom and transforming himself into a highly respected American citizen. Drawing on years of research and documentation, including Venture Smith’s rare personal autobiography, Saint and Krimsky vividly recount the extraordinary challenges he overcame. They cast a rare light on what it was like to be an African American in the north during the Colonial era. This story’s relevance today prompted the BBC to produce a documentary on scholars’ efforts to learn more about Venture Smith, his life, and family. The book includes a wealth of illustrations, a timeline, and Smith’s original 1798 narrative in facsimile form.
“The story of Venture Smith's life is not only extraordinary but is one of the most improbable biographies of American history. This fascinating and highly readable book will allow many readers to view the complexity of American slavery and race relations.”David Brion Davis, author of Inhuman Bondage: The Rise and Fall of Slavery in the New World
—David Brion Davis, author of Inhuman Bondage: The Rise and Fall of Slavery in the New World
From the Book:
“The life of Venture Smith is the American story: African-American history is American history, made by Americans in America.”—from the foreword by James O. Horton, author of Slavery and the Making of America
CHANDLER B. SAINT is president of the Beecher House Center for the Study of Equal Rights in Torrington, Connecticut. GEORGE A. KRIMSKY is a journalist and author, also residing in Connecticut. JAMES O. HORTON teaches history and American studies at George Washington University. The author of many books, he serves as a consultant to The History Channel, Discovery Channel, PBS, and ABC.
Available: August 2008
Garnet Books
Wesleyan University Press
distributed by University Press of New England
2008 • 192 pp. 55 b/w illus. 5 1/2 x 8 1/2"
History - American / African-American Studies / New England
$18.95 Cloth, 978-0-8195-6854-0
Boston Beheld
Antique Town and Country Views
D. Brenton Simons
Boston seen anew through historical paintings
A unique collection of more than sixty original works of art from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Boston Beheld depicts scenes from a bygone era not immediately recognizable to the modern eye. In this stunning and informative volume of full-color period images by professional and amateur artists alike, you will discover sweeping vistas, lively street scenes, and elegant edifices that reveal Boston as a youthful and vibrant town. Selected from both public and private collections by D. Brenton Simons and ranging from fine art to folk art, these works capture the multifaceted character of a sometimes quaint place that has given way to a modern metropolis with the attendant urban sprawl. Boston Beheld offers a portfolio of rarely seen views of the town John Winthrop famously called a “city upon a hill.” Bostonians are seen engaged in everyday commerce, strolling along tree-lined streets, parading on the Common, navigating the harbor, and fomenting historic events. Each image is accompanied by descriptive text highlighting famous landmarks, points of interest, and quotes from famous residents and travelers. From the North End to the South Bay, Boston Beheld offers an ever fascinating and occasionally poignant portrait of a beloved city known now only through these images and the historical record.
D. BRENTON SIMONS, author of the award-winning Witches, Rakes, and Rogues: True Stories of Scam, Scandal, Murder, and Mayhem in Boston, 1630–1775 (2006), is President and CEO of the New England Historic Genealogical Society, the nation’s leading center for family and local history research.
Available: October 2008
University Press of New England
152 pp. 64 full color illus. 11 x 9"
Art / Architecture / Boston
$35.00 Cloth, 978-1-58465-740-8
Slavery and Sentiment
The Politics of Feeling in Black Antislavery Writing, 1770-1850
Christine Levecq
Illuminates the political dimensions of American and British antislavery texts written by blacks
From the eighteenth century on, appeals to listeners’ and readers’ feelings about the sufferings of slaves were a predominant strategy of abolitionism. This book argues that expressions of feeling in those texts did not just appeal to individual readers’ inclinations to sympathy but rather were inherently political. The authors of these texts made arguments from the social and political ideologies that grounded their moral and social lives.
Levecq examines liberalism and republicanism, the main Anglo-American political ideologies of the period, in the antislavery texts of a range of African-American and Afro-British authors. Disclosing the political content hitherto unexamined in this kind of writing, she shows that while the overall story is one of increased liberalization of ideology on both sides of the Atlantic, the republican ideal persisted, particularly among black authors with transatlantic connections.
Demonstrating that such writers as Phillis Wheatley, Ignatius Sancho, Olaudah Equiano, Frederick Douglass, and Mary Prince were men and women of their times, Levecq provides valuable new insight into the ideological world of black Atlantic writers and puts them, for the first time, on modernity’s political map.
CHRISTINE LEVECQ teaches courses in both the Humanities and African Diaspora Studies as an Assistant Professor in the Humanities Department at Kettering University in Flint, Michigan.
Available: October 2008
Becoming Modern: New Nineteenth-Century Studies
University of New Hampshire Press
University Press of New England
304 pp. 6 x 9"
African-American Studies / American Studies
$50.00 Cloth, 978-1-58465-734-7
European Art at Dartmouth
Highlights from the Hood Museum of Art
T. Barton Thurber
Second in a series of publications presenting the Hood’s extensive and varied collections
The earliest known European objects to arrive at Dartmouth were “a few coins and curiosities” obtained by President John Wheelock during his 1783 tour of England, France, Holland, and Scotland. The collection grew gradually throughout the nineteenth century, but the introduction of European art history courses in 1905 led to a significant expansion of the College’s holdings. A dramatic increase in gifts and acquisitions occurred after the 1985 opening of the Hood Museum of Art, which now has over 7,500 European works of art dating from the Renaissance to the early twentieth century.
European Art at Dartmouth is the second in a series of catalogues from the Hood that will highlight different areas of the museum’s collection, following the publication last year of American Art at Dartmouth. Future volumes will feature contemporary art and Native American art. European Art is the first book to present the quality and variety of these works in the museum, of which only a small portion is exhibited regularly though hundreds are used for teaching each year. The fully illustrated catalogue includes an introductory essay by T. Barton Thurber that documents the history of the formation of the collection as well as entries by thirty American and European scholars.
The core of the European collection, comprised of an exceptional array of works on paper, has been significantly enhanced in recent decades by the addition of a large number of remarkable paintings and sculptures. The catalogue highlights over 150 objects from the Italian and German Renaissance, the Dutch Golden Age,
the Enlightenment and Romantic periods, and the early modern era. Featured artists include Andrea Mantegna, Pietro Perugino, Albrecht Dürer, Claude Lorrain, Rembrandt van Rijn, Jan Davidsz de Heem, Louis-Léopold Boilly, John Constable, Georges Braque, and Pablo Picasso. The European holdings of the Hood Museum of Art, now far more varied in nature, serve diverse audiences within and well beyond the College community and its environs.
T. BARTON THURBER is Curator of European Art, Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College. He has been a visiting fellow at Villa I Tatti and the Harvard University Center for Italian Renaissance Studies, and he has received fellowships at the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts and the Folger Shakespeare Library. His publications include exhibition catalogues, articles, and reviews focusing on European art and architecture from the Renaissance to the Age of Enlightenment. He has curated numerous exhibitions at the Hood Museum of Art and elsewhere.
Available: October 2008
University Press of New England
256 pp. 200 illus. (190 color) 9 1/2 x 12"
Art
$40.00 Paper, 978-1-58465-724-8
Temples in the Sacred City
New H(e)aven, Connecticut
Lee M.; Lara Smith; Jaime Lara, fwd.; Robert A. Lisak, Photo.
A full-color guidebook to historically and architecturally important places of worship in New Haven
Founded originally for the exercise of religious practice, the New Haven Colony has evolved, thanks to the immigrants who have settled there, into a richly textured, multiethnic tapestry of living worship traditions. Moreover, we now know that the urban plan of New Haven was laid out according to a biblical model as a holy metropolis. Temples in the Sacred City offers a tour of local and regional synagogues and churches, along with the chapels at Yale. The book is designed to appeal to a broad audience of residents, newcomers, and visitors to the region, as well as to students of religious studies and multicultural religious expression.
Lee M. Smith, a liturgical and American religious historian and an American Baptist minister, lives in Atlanta, Georgia. Jaime Lara is Associate Professor of Christian Art and Architecture at Yale University. His most recent book is Christian Texts for Aztecs: Art and Liturgy in Colonial Mexico (2008). The noted photographer Robert A. Lisak is a longtime resident of New Haven.
Available: September 2008
Architecture / Photography / New England
$32.95 Paper, 978-0-9749457-6-7
Remodeling the Nation
The Architecture of American Identity, 1776-1858
Duncan Faherty
A rich analysis of how post Revolutionary Americans conceptualized the early Republic through metaphors of home building
In this interdisciplinary study, Faherty argues that throughout the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, Americans conceptualized their still unsettled political and social states through metaphors of home building. During this period, a pervasive concern with the design and furnishing of houses helped writers to manage previous encounters with settlements, both native and European, and to imagine and remodel a new national ideal. By aligning the period’s architectural concerns (registered in both the interior and exterior of houses) with concurrent debates about the need to create a national identity in the wake of the American Revolution, Faherty registers how representations of the house were a crucial locus for debating broadly shared concerns about the anxieties of nation building.
Topics include Abraham Lincoln’s use of architectural motifs in his 1858 senatorial campaign (the “house divided against itself ” speech); the arguments about domestic identity embodied in the designs of Mount Vernon and Monticello; the lingering import of colonial and indigenous settlements on post-revolutionary culture as registered in the work of William Bartram and Lewis and Clark; Charles Brockden Brown’s representations of the multivalent legacies of Pennsylvania’s architectural landscapes; Washington Irving’s attempts to preserve and remodel national architectural and literary practices by underscoring the manufactured nature of European cultural production; the shifting importance of the house and American attitudes toward nature in the work of three generations of the Cooper family; and the gendering of domestic space in the work of Edgar Allen Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Herman Melville.
Richly informed by contemporary work in literary studies, history, art history, and cultural criticism, Remodeling the Nation ranges incisively across the work of political theorists, social critics, novelists, poets, natural historians, landscape artists, travel writers, and authors of architectural and domestic treatises.
"Showing how views of domestic architecture reflect shifting conceptions of American identity, Faherty adds a fascinating chapter to American cultural and intellectual history. Expertly navigating between architecture,literature , and art, Faherty provides a broadly interdisciplinary study that illuminates each of these fields and creates a sweeping panorama of American culture."—David Reynolds, author of Walt Whitman’s America: A Cultural Biography, winner of the Bancroft Prize and the Ambassador Book Award; finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award
“Remodeling the Nation asks big question and provides eye-opening answers. Duncan Faherty's ambitious book sheds new light on the formation of American identity between the Revolution and Civil War, and through his focus on architecture offers a way of reconceptualizing the period. This is essential reading for all students of post-Revolutionary and antebellum American culture.”—Louis P. Masur, William R. Kenan Jr. Professor of American Institutions and Values, Trinity College
DUNCAN FAHERTY is Assistant Professor, Department of English, Queens College, City University of New York.
Available: October 2007
Becoming Modern: New Nineteenth-Century Studies
University of New Hampshire Press
University Press of New England
2007 • 280 pp. 15 ht 6 x 9"
Architecture / American Studies
Samuel McIntire
Carving an American Style
Dean T. Lahikainen
The first full-length study of a master carpenter, wood carver, and early American architectural designer
For more than a century, historians have been searching for the true Samuel McIntire (1757–1811) and have been trying to define his role in shaping the cultural heritage of Salem, Massachusetts. Trained as a carpenter by his father, McIntire taught himself the art of architectural drawing and went on to design scores of public and private buildings in Salem, long celebrated for their elegance and beauty. After 1790, however, he made his living primarily as a wood carver, providing ornamental decoration for many of the buildings he designed as well as for furniture and more than two dozen sailing vessels. McIntire was also called upon to carve portrait busts and even a model of a historic pear, commissions that brought him into the realm of academic sculpture.
Samuel McIntire: Carving an American Style is the first book to examine the full range of his carving career and to put it into a broader perspective in terms of the work of his contemporaries and other decorative traditions of the Federal period. The book draws on the remarkable collections of the Peabody Essex Museum, in Salem, Massachusetts, which owns most of McIntire’s architectural drawings and several of his most important buildings, as well as furniture in public and private collections from around the country. Lahikainen presents a critical analysis of McIntire’s carving style and questions some long-held attributions that shed new light on his role as a furniture maker and designer. Samuel McIntire: Carving an American Style accompanies a major exhibition of McIntire’s work, curated by Lahikainen, which will open at the Peabody Essex Museum in October 2007. This book is not an exhibition catalogue; rather, it is an in-depth examination of the works by this master carver that will be required reading for anyone interested in Federal-era design, decorative art, and architecture.
DEAN T. LAHIKAINEN is the Carolyn and Peter Lynch Curator of American Decorative Art at the Peabody Essex Museum, Salem, Massachusetts. With degrees in art history from Syracuse University, he is author of numerous articles and books, including In the American Spirit: Folk Art from the Collections Peabody Essex Museum (1994). He has also organized numerous exhibitions including Coastal Massachusetts (1997) and Luxury and Innovation: Furniture Masterworks of John and Thomas Seymour (2003).
Available: October 2007
distributed by University Press of New England
2007 • 304 pp. 191 illus. 193 duotones, 65 ls 9 x 12"
Decorative Arts & Material Culture / Architecture
$75.00 Cloth, 0-87577-209-9
Early Connecticut Silver, 1700–1840
Peter Bohan, Philip Hammerslough, Erin Eisenbarth, intro.
“It is highly improbable that any subsequent work on the subject could surpass this book… Bohan and Hammerslough have covered the subject with unprecedented thoroughness.”—Choice
The preeminent study of Connecticut’s silvercraft, back in print with a new introduction
Early Connecticut Silver is a catalog of the most significant pieces of silver hollowware made by Connecticut silversmiths between the years 1700 and 1840, as well as representative flatware and other pieces such as swords and Masonic jewels. In all, it constitutes an exhibit that could never be mounted in a single museum, and one that proves the authors’ conviction that Connecticut silver is distinctive and worthy of comparison to the more sophisticated contemporary styles associated with the silversmiths of Boston and New York City. Wesleyan is proud to offer a new edition of this essential work, featuring an introduction by Erin Eisenbarth that brings the coverage up to date, incorporating the research done on this subject since the original publication. The book still includes an introductory essay that defines “the Connecticut school,” and an annotated index of silversmiths known to have worked in Connecticut and an index of the marks used by them.
“This book fills a significant niche in the literature on early American silver. Its importance for researchers has only grown since its original publication, and its comprehensiveness makes it an excellent title for scholars and students of the decorative arts.”—Donald L. Fennimore, curator emeritus, Winterthur Museum
“This is a unique and classic reference work whose reputation remains undiluted by time. As useful today as when it was first published, this book remains the largest single source of information on its subject.”—Jeannine Falino, former curator, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
TABLE OF CONTENTS
List of Illustrations • Preface • Introduction by Erin Eisenbarth • The Connecticut Silversmith • Tradition and Innovation in Connecticut Silver • Illustrations of Hollowware and Selected Flatware • Biographical Notes on the Silversmiths • Index of Marks • Selected Bibliography • Owners of Pieces Illustrated • Picture Credits • Index of Silversmiths Whose Work Is Illustrated
PETER BOHAN was professor emeritus of art history at the State University of New York at New Paltz and published several books on American silver and gold. PHILIP HAMMERSLOUGH was a private collector and silver enthusiast. ERIN EISENBARTH is the Marcia Brady Tucker Curatorial Fellow in American decorative arts at the Yale University Art Gallery.
Available: December 2007
Garnet Books
Wesleyan University Press
distributed by University Press of New England
2007 • 312 pp. 648 8 1/2 x 11"
Antiques & Collectibles / Decorative Arts & Material Culture / Connecticut
La Gazette Françoise, 1780-1781
Revolutionary America’s French Newspaper
Eugena Poulin, trs., Claire Quintal, trs.
A historical look into the lives politics, and opinions of the French soldiers as they lived on American soil during the Revolutionary War
On July 11, 1780, after a sixty-nine-day voyage, 6,000 French troops under the command of General Rochambeau disembarked in Newport, R.I. Cognizant of the anti-Catholic feelings against France that ran rampant among the general population, the French military officers who arrived in Newport on that July day anxiously descended from their ship, not knowing how they would be received.
Once it became clear that the French stay in Newport would last through the winter months, the French soldiers began printing a newspaper, using the press that was carried on board the ship. The first issue of the Newport newspaper, the Gazette Françoise, appeared on November 17, 1780, followed by six consecutive issues and a final Supplement on January 2, 1781. The original purpose of the Gazette was to satisfy the curiosity of French officers seeking to educate themselves about their American military counterparts. To revisit the newspaper now is to capture a moment in American history, to see a unique perspective on Revolutionary America, naval customs of the era, and the political and social ambiance of Newport during the Revolution.
In this newly translated and annotated edition of La Gazette Françoise, published by Salve Regina University Press, Eugena Poulin and Claire Quintal have revisited the texts of the original French newspaper, translating them and comparing them to the English newspaper articles upon which they were based. La Gazette performed a distinct service, that of informing quasi-idle and eager-to-fight young military men of persons like them involved in a great experiment in democracy, one upon which they could look back with immense satisfaction in later years, with a sense of exhilaration that comes from having helped to achieve a momentous victory that changed the course of history.
EUGENA POULIN, RSM, Ph.D., has been a faculty member at Salve Regina University for more than twenty years. Dr. Poulin has been honored by the state of Rhode Island as the Franco-American of the Year, and has been inducted into the Franco-American Hall of Fame by the American French Genealogical Society.
CLAIRE QUINTAL, Docteur de l’Université de Paris, is the founding Director emerita of the French Institute and Professor emerita of French and Francophone Culture at Assumption College in Worcester, Massachusetts.
Available: January 2008
distributed by University Press of New England
2008 • 168 pp. 12 ht 6 x 9"
History - American / History - British & European / American Revolutionary War / French History
$45.00 Cloth, 1-58465-663-8
Folded Selves
Colonial New England Writing in the World System
Michelle Burnham
Re-Encounters with Colonialism
A new evaluation of New England’s literature of dissent in works by early English settlers in America
Folded Selves radically refigures traditional portraits of seventeenth-century New England literature and culture by situating colonial writing within the spatial, transnational, and economic contexts that characterized the early-modern “world system” theorized by Immanuel Wallerstein and others. Michelle Burnham rethinks American literary history and the politics of colonial dissent, and her book breaks new ground in making the economic relations of investment, credit, and trade central to this new framework for early American literary and cultural study.
Transcontinental colonialism and mercantile capitalism underwrote not just the emerging world system but New World writing—suggesting that early modern literary aesthetics and the early modern economy helped to sponsor each other. Burnham locates in New England’s literature of dissent—from Ma-re Mount to the Salem witchcraft trials – a persistent use of economic language, as well as competing economies of style. The brilliance of Burnham’s study is that it exposes the transoceanic material and commercial concerns of colonial America’s literature and culture of dissent.
Michelle Burnham is Associate Professor of English at Santa Clara University. She is the author of Captivity and Sentiment (UPNE, 1997).
Dartmouth College PressUniversity Press of New England
2007 • 240 pp. 6 halftone illus. 6 x 9”
American Studies / History - American
$30.00 Paper, 1-58465-618-2
$65.00 Cloth, 1-58465-617-4
Philadelphia Empire Furniture
Allison Boor, Christopher Boor, John William Boor, Jonathan Boor, Peter Boor
The first book-length study of American furniture from Philadelphia’s Neo-Classical period
This volume looks closely for the first time at Philadelphia Empire furniture and the development of decorative arts in Philadelphia between 1800 and 1840. The authors explore Neo-Classicism, contemporary history of Philadelphia, the emergence of Greek-Revival architecture, and the cabinetmakers of Philadelphia Empire furniture. The furniture illustrated in this comprehensive catalogue comes from various sources, including the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Atheneum of Philadelphia, the Winterthur Museum in Delaware, The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, The White House Historical Association, and from many private collections.
At the beginning of the 19th century Greek-inspired architecture gained popularity in Philadelphia and the city became known for its classically-inspired monumental buildings. Newly designed structures of ancient inspiration were decorated with classical furniture that became the prevailing style in private homes as well as public buildings.
The arrival of immigrant craftsmen from Europe in the early 19th century and their subsequent collaboration with American furniture makers produced highly sophisticated Empire designs. Neither French nor English, the designs incorporated purely American elements and became known as American Empire. Nineteenth-century Philadelphia Empire craftsmen were particularly well-known for their extensive motif carving, which often has a fluid, three-dimensional character.
Philadelphia Empire Furniture illustrates in color and describes in detail hundreds of Philadelphia decorative art forms from this period, including wood types, dimensions, and maker (if known). Chapters are dedicated to each of the following forms: card tables, platform pedestal tables, pier tables, worktables, sofas, chairs, sideboards, secretaries, chests, bedsteads, looking glasses, clocks, and other decorative elements. A separate chapter is devoted to the previously unpublished sketchbook of accomplished craftsman Anthony G. Quervelle. Besides Quervelle, other talented and successful Philadelphia furniture makers included Michel Bouvier, Charles White, Cook & Parkin, and Joseph B. Barry, among several. This book provides historical data about their lives and careers.
Dr. John William Boor lives outside Philadelphia and has been an avid collector of Philadelphia Empire furniture for over 30 years. The absence of any other volume solely dedicated to Philadelphia Empire furniture, as well as Dr. Boor’s great love and appreciation of the Empire furniture style was the inspiration for writing this book.
Allison, Jonathan, Chris, and Peter Boor collaborated with their father to help produce this volume and worked on all aspects including research, writing, photography, and technical support; and although they follow different career paths, including medicine and business, an interest in Empire furniture is something they share and have grown up with.
Allison, Jonathan, and Chris live abroad in Russia, St. Martin, and Canada respectively.
Boor2007 • 624 pp. 500 illus. 9 x 12”
Decorative Arts & Material Culture
$139.00 Cloth, 0-9777816-0-7
Acquired Tastes
200 Years of Collecting for the Boston Athenaeum
Stanley Cushing, David B. Dearinger
A stunning commemoration of 200 years of collecting, study, and debate at this venerable Boston institution
This book celebrates the 200th anniversary of the historic Boston Athenæum, one of this country’s earliest and most prestigious repositories of books, paintings, sculpture, engravings, maps, photographs, manuscripts, decorative arts, and other artifacts of history and design. Acquired Tastes is the first in-depth, scholarly study of the Boston Athenæum’s collections and the manner in which they were gathered from the early nineteenth to the early twenty-first centuries. These topics are expanded and brought into sharper focus in fully-illustrated catalogue entries on a wide variety of objects that represent the breadth of the Athenæum’s holdings.
From its founding in 1807, the Boston Athenæum’s primary mission has been to provide collections that stimulate study, discussion, and debate on all topics of interest to the enquiring mind. In the Enlightenment of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries—the historic period that saw the founding of the Boston Athenæum and similar organizations—it was believed that intellectual endeavors more easily germinated and thrived in an atmosphere that was spacious, comfortable, quiet, and aesthetically pleasing. Here, books and manuscripts could be preserved, logically organized, and made accessible, and utilitarian objects could be logically grouped with didactic ones for comparison and discussion. In this setting, too, fine examples of paintings, sculpture, drawings, and engravings fulfilled their traditional purposes of education and inspiration and—together with those from the world of science—stimulated imaginations, im proved morals, and refined aesthetic tastes. Celebrate the Boston Athenæum’s 2007 bi-centennial with this lavish tribute, published in conjunction with one of the most ambitious Athenæum exhibitions ever mounted.
Stanley Ellis Cushing graduated from Boston University and joined the staff of the Boston Athenæum in 1970. For thirty years he served as Chief Conservator of the Library, responsible for the care and preservation of its book and manuscript collections. Currently, he is the Athenæum’s Curator of Rare Books. He is the author of The George Washington Library Collection (1997) and 50 Books in the Collection of the Boston Athenæum (1994).
David B. Dearinger is the Susan Morse Hilles Curator of Paintings and Sculpture at the Boston Athenæum. He holds a Ph.D in American art history from the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. He has curated many exhibitions in Boston and New York, and published and lectured widely on various topics in nineteenth-century American art. Among his publications are Rave Reviews: American Art and Its Critics, 1825-1925 (2000) and Paintings and Sculpture in the Collection of the National Academy of Design (2004). He is currently an adjunct member of the art history faculty at the State University of New York’s Fashion Institute of Technology in New York.
Available: February 2007Boston Athenaeum distributed by University Press of New England
9 1/4 x 12”
Decorative Arts & Material Culture / Antiques & Collectibles
$65.00 Cloth, 0-934552-73-8
The Line of Forts
Historical Archaeology on the Colonial Frontier of Massachusetts
Michael D. Coe
A fascinating analysis of artifacts that illuminates relationships among the English, French, and Indians at a critical moment in American history
During the mid-eighteenth century, colonists constructed a line of forts along the northwest boundary of Massachusetts as a defense against the French and their Indian allies. Many of these “forts” were simply reinforced houses. Of the three major forts in the line, one, Fort Massachusetts, is now buried beneath a parking lot in North Adams. Of the two remaining forts, Fort Shirley in the town of Heath was excavated by Michael D. Coe of Yale University; the other, Fort Pelham in Rowe, was excavated by Daniel Ingersoll of the University of Massachusetts. To the casual observer, the sites might not seem significant--but as Coe argues, two circumstances make these forts more important to the study of eighteenth-century life in the American colonies than their modest size would indicate.
First, their period of occupation was extremely short: they were built in 1744, abandoned in 1754, and never used again. Thus, they give a unique snapshot of the material culture of the time. Second, the Line of Forts is abundantly documented. The Williams family of western Massachusetts (chief among the “River Gods,” the group of elite families who people Coe's story) controlled most of the colony from the Connecticut River valley west to the New York line. The Williamses were the forts' leading officers and ran their commissaries. This powerful family left voluminous documents that provide a unique window into daily life on the Massachusetts frontier and help interpret what was found in the remains of the forts.
From Williams family archives and artifacts from Fort Shirley and Fort Pelham, Coe weaves a rich drama. His tale comprises the final standoff between New England's English settlers and Native Americans, the ideological conflict between Calvinistic Protestantism and Roman Catholicism, the occasional frictions between colonial militia and the British regular army, and the larger struggle between England and France for North America.
MICHAEL D. COE is Charles J. MacCurdy Professor of Anthropology, Emeritus, at Yale University. He was for many years Chairman of the Council on Archaeological Studies at Yale. Renowned in the field of Mayan anthropology and archaeology, Coe has written over a dozen books on Mesoamerican archaeology and culture. His most recent book is Angkor and the Khymer Civilization (2005).
June 2006188 pp. 50 illus. 7 x 10"
Archaeology
$19.95 Paper, 1-58465-542-9
A Century in Captivity
The Life and Trials of Prince Mortimer, a Connecticut Slave
Denis R. Caron
The riveting reconstruction of an eighteenth-century slave's life and imprisonment
On December 21, 1811, a Middletown, Connecticut judge sentenced Prince Mortimer, a sickly eighty-seven-year-old slave, to life imprisonment for attempting to poison his master by lacing his chocolate drink with arsenic. Prince spent the next sixteen years in Connecticut's notorious Newgate Prison, a colonial copper mine that had been converted into America's first state prison. In 1827 the dungeons at Newgate were closed forever, and the prisoners were transferred to the newly constructed Wethersfield State Prison. Wethersfield was supposed to be modern and progressive, but prisoners suffered there every bit as much as at Newgate. In 1834, Prince died there in his 31/2-by-7-foot cell, reportedly at the age of 110. From his capture into slavery as a child in Guinea in about 1730, through his more than eighty years as a slave and twenty-three years as a prisoner, Prince had endured more than a century in captivity.
In an astounding feat of historical inquiry and scholarship, author Denis R. Caron has assembled a mass of facts and insights that will mesmerize general interest readers and students of African American, regional, legal, and penal history alike. A Century in Captivity is a marvelous and sobering story previously lost to history, filled with dashed dreams of freedom, unrelenting miseries, and struggles for wealth and power.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Preface • Acknowledgments • The Trial • The Early Years • The Will to Be Free • The Codicils • Probate • The Appeal • The Conviction Revisited • To Newgate • Early Newgate • Mortimer, Prince • Freedom Delayed • The Counterfeiter • The Bible Peddler • Three and a Half Feet • Moses and Amos • Old Soldiers • Acidum Arseniosum • Postscript • Notes • Bibliographic Note • Index
DENIS R. CARON is an attorney for a national title insurance company. He is the author of Connecticut Foreclosures, now in its fourth edition, and has written and lectured on many aspects of real property law.
“Denis Caron brings the analytic skills of a lawyer to the task of fleshing out the largely undocumented life of an eighteenth-century slave. While his scholarship is thorough and precise, Caron's narrative is accessible and compelling to the average reader.” — Stephen Goddard, author of Colonel Albert Pope and his American Dream Machines
Revisiting New England: The New Regionalism
University of New Hampshire Press/University Press of New England
208 pp. 12 illus. 6 x 9"
African-American Studies
$19.95 Paper, 1-58465-540-2
$55.00 Cloth, 1-58465-539-9
Guide to Winterthur Museum & Country Estate
Pauline K. Eversmann
Winterthur offers a rare combination of beauty, history, art, and learning. Nestled in the scenic Brandywine Valley of Delaware, the estate is the former home of three generations of du Ponts, including Henry Francis du Pont, a scion of the family whose industrial achievements played a significant role in American history. Entering the estate, visitors encounter tangible reminders of its past. Rolling meadows, freshwater ponds, stone bridges, greenhouses, dairy barns, a vast garden, workers' housing, and an imposing mansion all remind us of the days when Winterthur figured prominently in the American country estate movement. In the 1920s, the property encompassed more than 2,600 acres and housed some 250 resident workers. It consisted of numerous farms; the finest dairy herd of Holstein-Friesian cattle in America; an expansive, wooded landscape with a naturalistic garden; and a family manor house that provided the perfect setting for country-house weekend entertaining.
While developing the family home as a country estate and collecting the finest American decorative arts, H. F. du Pont was also beginning to envision a wider role for his Winterthur--one that would eventually include opening the mansion and grounds to the public, offering all a glimpse of life in the past: “My idea of Winterthur is that it is a country estate museum, to show Americans of the future what a country place and farm were like.” Since 1951, its guests have enjoyed just that experience.
Today Winterthur's thousand-acre estate offers much for visitors to explore: a world-class museum of decorative arts that celebrates the best in style and craftsmanship; a romantic landscape of incomparable beauty that imparts the peace and great calm of a country place; a naturalistic garden that combines the art of horticulture and landscape design; and a superlative research library that supports Winterthur's graduate programs in early American culture and art conservation.
PAULINE K. EVERSMANN, a prolific author and longtime educator at Winterthur, is currently Director of the Library, Collections Management, and Academic Programs Division of the museum. She is author of The Winterthur Guide to Recognizing Styles (2001), Discover the Winterthur Estate (2001), and Discover the Winterthur Period Rooms (1998), all distributed by UPNE.
Winterthur distributed by University Press of New England2005 • 104 pp. 197 illus 8 x 11"
Decorative Arts & Material Culture
$15.95 Paper, 0-912724-65-X
Mocha and Related Dipped Wares, 1770—1939
Jonathan Rickard
An authoritative guide to the history and craft of this rare and much sought-after ceramic ware
Until now, mocha ware, with its mysterious origins and variable nomenclature, has not been widely studied or chronicled. Jonathan Rickard, with more than thirty years’ experience as a collector, scholar, and enthusiast of mocha and dipped wares, has written the definitive book on this once widely produced pottery.
Long considered a uniquely Victorian product, mocha ware was actually developed as early as the late eighteenth century. It was likely named after the Yemeni port city of al Mukha, famed for its trade in a moss agate, known as “mocha stone,” which resembled the beautiful and delicate treelike striations (the products of chemical reactions) for which mocha ware is best known. Rickard outlines the development of new types of slip decoration and the tools that made them possible. Because mocha ware was made with relatively soft clay and designed mainly for everyday use, surviving specimens are rare and thus highly prized by collectors today.
By his strict definition of mocha ware, Rickard makes an argument in favor of period terminology in describing other types of lathe-turned slipwares. He offers a detailed analysis of production techniques and decorative typologies, as well as a broad-ranging history of the wares from their development in eighteenth-century England to their widespread popularity in the American market well into the twentieth century. This definitive volume also contains a discussion of mocha’s principal manufacturers, a detailed glossary, and a bibliography. Lavishly illustrated with color and black-and-white photographs, this book is an absolute necessity for casual and experienced collectors, museum curators, and scholars of British and American material culture.
“Mocha and Related Dipped Wares… confirms the charm of this centuries old ceramic… extensive and detailed chapters… very engaging.” --Antique & Collectible News Service
"[An] exciting book [that] confirms the charm of a centuries old ceramic." --Country Pleasures Magazine
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Foreword • Introduction • Dipped Wares in Historic Context • Variegated Surfaces • Engine-Turned Dipped Wares • Mocha Decoration • The Multichambered Slip Pot • Solid-Color Slip Fields and Banded Wares • Trailed Slip and Offset Decoration • Dipped Fan Decoration • Combinations and Other Oddities • French and North American Production • The Makers of Dipped Wares • Bibliography • Index
JONATHAN RICKARD is a self-employed writer and graphic designer. He is a former trustee of the American Ceramic Circle and the Antiquarian and Landmarks Society in Hartford, Connecticut, and writes and lectures frequently on ceramics history and design.
January 2006University Press of New England
200 pp. 100 Color illus., 208 B&W illus., end papers. 8 1/2 x 11"
Decorative Arts & Material Culture
$65.00 Cloth, 1-58465-513-5
Connecticut Historical Society Museum
Connecticut Valley Furniture by Eliphalet Chapin and His Contemporaries, 1750-1800
Kugelman, Thomas P., Alice K. Kugelman, with Robert Lionetti, Susan Schoelwer, ed.
Presented for the first time, the richly illustrated findings of the Hartford Case Furniture Study
Connecticut Valley Furniture offers the first-ever systematic framework for classifying eighteenth-century Connecticut case furniture—high chests, dressing tables, desks, bureaus, chests-on-chests. Nearly two hundred illustrated entries present the findings of the Hartford Case Furniture Study, an extensive field study of over five hundred regional examples conducted over fourteen years by independent furniture scholars Thomas P. Kugelman and Alice K. Kugelman and furniture consultant and restorer Robert Lionetti.
The book defines four major style centers emanating from the towns of Wethersfield, East Windsor, and Colchester, Connecticut, as well the Springfield-Northampton region of Massachusetts. Over half of the illustrations feature unpublished or little-known furniture pieces discovered in private or small institutional collections, in addition to the extraordinary holdings of the Connecticut Historical Society Museum and other major collections.
Complementing the text are period maps, an illustrated glossary, biographies of selected cabinetmakers, and six interpretive essays.
“The Connecticut Historical Society Museum gathered important pieces of furnishings made during Connecticut's golden age of furniture production for ‘Connecticut Valley Furniture by Eliphalet Chapin and His Contemporaries, 1750-1800,’ which is on view until January 15. A similarly named landmark reference book, Connecticut Valley Furniture: Eliphalet Chapin and His Contemporaries, 1750-1800, is being published by the museum (November 2005) and distributed by the University Press of New England. ‘One of the most exciting results of the exhibition for both collectors and scholars is that it provides a framework to trace specific Connecticut furniture to particular places at particular times,’ says Susan Schoelwer, director of museum collections.” —artandantiques.net
THOMAS P. AND ALICE K. KUGELMAN are lifelong collectors who have become leading authorities on Connecticut Valley furniture. They created the Hartford Case Furniture Survey (HCFS) in 1990 and have conducted detailed research including systematic examinations of over five hundred regional examples. They have written and lectured extensively on their findings.
Connecticut Historical Society Museum distributed by University Press of New EnglandFebruary 2005 • 576 pp. 94 Color illus. 351 B & W illus. 4 maps 8 tables glossary 9 x 12"
Decorative Arts & Material Culture
$85.00 Cloth, 1-881264-08-4
The Gardiners of Massachusetts
Provincial Ambition and the British-American Career
T. A. Milford
An engaging biography of three generations of a prominent New England family.
The Gardiners of Massachusetts examines late eighteenth-century American political and cultural history through the lives and careers of three men from successive generations of a prominent New England family. Silvester Gardiner, who established the family’s fortunes in Boston, was a colonial surgeon, a dedicated Anglican, and a Loyalist. He received his medical training in Britain before settling in Massachusetts, where he became a giant in the drugs trade. In the mid-eighteenth century, as a director of the Kennebeck Company, he acquired vast landholdings in what became the state of Maine.
At the end of the Revolution, when Silvester’s estates were in jeopardy, his son John returned to his native New England after a long absence. Fully at ease within the British Atlantic Empire, John relied on his knowledge of imperial administration and on his connections at Whitehall and Westminster to enhance his career. He attended university in Glasgow during the Scottish Enlightenment and studied law at London’s Inns of Court. His legal practice took him to Wales and the Caribbean island of St. Kitts. Returning to Boston in the 1780s, he emerged as a figure of considerable public controversy. John’s son, J.S.J. Gardiner, was an Episcopal priest and a leader of Boston’s Federalist literati.
As Milford describes the careers of these three men, he contends that the Gardiners exemplified the ambitions of the cosmopolitan middle class throughout the British Empire and English-speaking Atlantic world during the decades just before and after the American Revolution. He also uses this history to intervene in the long-running scholarly debate over the relative influence of liberalism and republicanism in the political culture of the early republic. The Gardiners’ ambitions, Milford suggests, demonstrate a deep allegiance to the liberal vocabulary of private gains and public good—a vocabulary in which Americans had been schooled by their imperial engagements. Because of this attachment to liberalism, the disintegration of British authority in the colonies presented an acute dilemma for those New Englanders for whom the British Empire had offered an expanding array of professional opportunities.
T.A. Milford grew up in Michigan and took his baccalaureate and doctoral degrees from Duke and Harvard. He lives in Brooklyn and is an assistant professor of history at St. John’s University.
Revisiting New England: The New Regionalism
University of New Hampshire Press/University Press of New England
328 pp. 3 illus. 6 x 9"Biography & Letters
$26.00 Paper, 1-58465-504-6
$65.00 Cloth, 1-58465-503-8
October 2005
The Sedgwicks in Love
Courtship, Engagement, and Marriage in the Early Republic
Timothy Kenslea
The evolving relationship between men and women in the early nineteenth century, as lived by the Sedgwick family of Massachusetts.
On a spring day in 1774, in western Massachusetts’ Berkshire County, Pamela Dwight and Theodore Sedgwick were married. Theodore—destined to become one of the Federalist party’s leaders in the U.S. Congress in the 1790s and later an influential judge on Massachusetts’ highest court—was almost twenty-eight, and three years a widower. Pamela, not quite twenty-one, was marrying Theodore Sedgwick over the clearly stated objections of her widowed mother. In the course of her thirty-three-year marriage to Theodore, Pamela gave birth to ten children, seven of whom—four sons and three daughters—survived to adulthood. All but one of them would marry. The courtships, engagements, and marriages of the sons and daughters of Theodore and Pamela are the subject of this book.
Kenslea’s richly researched account of Sedgwicks in and out of love comprises three parts. In Part 1, he examines Theodore and Pamela’s marriage, characterized by Theodore’s long absences and Pamela’s depression and mental illness. He also looks at the courtships and marriages of their three oldest children, Eliza, Frances, and Theodore. These complex sets of relationships illuminate, among other things, the changing perceptions of the parental role in matchmaking, the vulnerability of wives abused by husbands, and the tenuous financial situation of widows in the early republic.
In Part 2, Kenslea turns to the Boston-based courtships of Harry and Robert Sedgwick, when the brothers courted “the friendlies,” a group of young women who taught them some important lessons, including the difficulties of navigating the subtle rules of social etiquette among the Boston elite. Harry met his future wife Jane among the friendlies. At the end of 1816, the two began a seven-month engagement, during which they were separated but kept up a voluminous correspondence. Part 3 highlights this correspondence, which shows a young couple envisioning for themselves a relationship of equals, despite the legal and cultural impediments of the day.
Kenslea’s epilogue considers Catharine Maria Sedgwick, the youngest sister and the best-known member of this generation of Sedgwicks. Catharine’s reflections on her single state, both published and private, enrich this history of the married Sedgwicks by offering an early nineteenth-century alternative to the marriage plot.
TIMOTHY KENSLEA is a history teacher at Norwell High School in Norwell, Massachusetts. He graduated from Yale University, has doctoral and master’s degrees in history from Boston College, and edited high school and college textbooks for many years.
Northeastern University Press/University Press of New England
288 pp. 6 x 9" Biography & Letters$29.95 Cloth, 1-58465-494-5
January 2006
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May 13, 2008